Pushkin Press has done it again: made me fall in love with a writer I've never heard of. It was the first paragraph of the first story here, "A Radiant Easter", that did it. I hope it has a similar effect on you:

"Samosov stood there gloomily, watching the deacon with the incense and thinking, 'Go on, swing that incense, swing that incense! Think you can swing yourself into a bishopric? Some hope!"

Written more than a hundred years ago, "A Radiant Easter" takes a traditional Russian form – the "uplifting" religious story – into a quiet alleyway and beats it to death. Like many of the stories here, it is so brief as to be almost a joke. It illustrates the way we pick on those lower than us in the social order. We see the misery being handed down all the way to a cat by a dustbin: "But what did the dustbin care? It said nothing." Yet each person is granted some humanity, some character. There is a very thin but discernible kind streak in Teffi's stories, which is not the same as having a soft heart.

Born in 1872 to a smart St Petersburg family, Teffi, the pseudonym of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, was the kind of writer who got stopped in the street by fans and could count among them Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II. (I get these facts from the excellent introduction by Anne Marie Jackson, who, with five others, translated these stories.) This, of course, was a recipe for trouble, and very soon after the revolution Teffi realised that staying in the country would be unwise. There's a fascinating – and true – account in this volume of her meetings with Rasputin, which demonstrates that writers were the only people Rasputin was scared of; and also that Teffi was utterly clear-eyed and her writings trustworthy as testimony.

That sort of writer doesn't last long in a dictatorship, so she went off to fire barbed shots at the revolution from Paris. The title story, "Subtly Worded" is itself a joke as hilarious as it is grim –that is, very funny, very grim – about the damage being done to language and thought by the Bolsheviks. "Everything's splendid here," says a correspondent from Russia to his brother abroad. "Anyuta has died from a strong appetite ..." I won't spoil the rest of the jokes for you, but they get better.

Teffi would also have a go at her fellow Russian expats in Paris. She was clearly unable to resist pointing out something absurd in any given situation, or making a telling joke about it, and doing so with splendid recklessness (cf the way she scornfully repulses Rasputin's increasingly insistent demands that she give herself to him. She just saw a ridiculous, smelly peasant with mental health issues who had somehow, to even his own astonishment, managed to hoodwink a whole set of febrile upper-crust Russians; and yet she also saw in him a portent of Russia's impending doom). Again, what she writes about the Russian expatriates – lesrusses (sic) – has the very strong whiff of truth about it:

"Every lesrusse hates all the others ... This general antipathy has given rise to several neologisms. Hence, for example, a new grammatical particle, "that-crook", placed before the name of every lesrusse anyone mentions: "that-crook Akimenko", "that-crook Petrov", "that-crook Savelyev".

"This particle lost its original meaning long ago and now equates to something between the French le, indicating the gender of the person named, and the Spanish honorific don ... "

It occurs to me that there are numerous times when Teffi notes linguistic mutations or barbarities; she pays close attention to linguistic use; she can write in more registers than you might think, and is capable of being heartbreaking as well as very funny. I wish she were still alive, and I could have met her. But then I realised she would have seen right through me. I can't recommend her strongly enough.

• To order Subtly Worded for £9.60 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.